Questions & Algorithm:

The first step in your Registration Setup is to configure your Questions & Algorithm. From your Registration () page, click on the Questions & Algorithm link:

You will be taken to the Questions & Algorithm page where you can review each of the different questions and fields that your users will provide information on when they register for your program:

There are two types of fields, Organization-Wide and Program-Specific: 

• Organization-Wide Fields provide a list of pre-set default fields including essential user information such as First Name, Last Name, and Email. These default options are the core components of the standard user information that constitutes user profiles across the platform and is filled by all users when they join Together! Admins can import details or gather them during user onboarding.
• Program-Specific Fields provide questions based on the template you chose earlier while creating your program, you will see a different set of questions listed here. By default, Together will automatically provide you with several different options that you can edit (or remove) if you would like.

Notes: Admins with limited program access cannot create Organization-Wide Fields. Matching logic attached to fields is always program-specific.

Some of the questions you see here are mandatory and must be answered by users, a DEFAULT tag accompanies these questions. The group of users that these questions are asked to is indicated along the left-hand side of the question. For example, the  Role question must be answered by all users (All Participants), whereas the Capacity question needs only to be answered by your Mentors:

Clicking on each of these questions will expand them to provide more information on what will be asked, along with some settings you can configure further.

• Note: Some settings will vary depending on the type of question being asked.

Adding Questions

Sometimes you might want to ask your users a specific question or collect a relevant piece of data to use to inform the matching process. To facilitate this, you will need to add a question by clicking on the blue Add button near the top of this page:

This will open a menu where you will see four options: Reuse questions from another program, Import data, Add a program-specific question, and Add an organization-wide question. Click on either Add a program-specific question or Add an organization-wide question:

1. Selecting your question type:

First, you need to decide what kind of field you will want to add. Your options will be broken down into two different categories: Identity and Personal Development. For my program, I am going to select the Hard Skills in Personal Development and click the Next button:

2. Configuring your question:

There are several key steps to creating and configuring your new question. We will run through each step below:

Select what kind of question you are creating:

The first step for configuring your question is to choose the type of question you are asking. In the last step, we selected Hard Skills in the Personal Development section. You can also change this to Identity or Custom based on your needs. 

Identity Question: This question is used to identify and match users with certain traits and is asked to All Participants. 

Personal Development Question: This question is used to match users based on their development needs such as their goals, skills, and aspirations. This will be phrased differently for each type of participant. 

Note: The matching logic for Personal Development Questions is set to 'Let users indicate their preference in match' and cannot be changed. This allows users to set their own match strength and update their matching preferences to create a more personalized mentorship experience. 

Custom Question: This question can be tailored to fit your program's needs. 

Select who will be asked this question:

The next step is to select who will be asked this question. By clicking on the drop-down menu, you can select either Mentor or Mentee. 

Note: Since I have Colleague Connect enabled for my program, I will be able to select either Mentor + Colleague or Mentee + Colleague.

Select your question format:

For the Personal Development question, you can choose between 3 options to arrange your response options:

• Multiple Choice
• Dropdown
• Categorized Multiple Choice

Each method of organizing has its pros and cons. Depending on the type of question you're asking and the number of options you intend on providing, you may find that a Dropdown or Categorized Multiple Choice is clearer for your users. Generally, we recommend that for long lists of response options, it can help to display them as a searchable dropdown. When there is some hierarchy (e.g. cities by country) it may help users think through their answers better when they are broken out into categories.

Note: For Identity and Custom questions, you will have 4 additional options to choose from: Numericm Short text input, Long text input, and PDF Upload.

Select your matching logic: 

If you have selected to create an Indetity or a Custom question, you will need to determine the matching rule for this field. Here you have a few different options available based on the question type you have selected previously: 

• No question logic: Responses will not have any effect on matching
• Matches: Look for overlap in responses between users
• Does not match: Avoid overlap in responses between users
• Matches in certain cases: Look for overlap in certain combinations of responses
• Let users indicate their preference in match: Adds the ability for users to indicate their desired match attributes

Each matching rule will work slightly differently depending on how you would like users to match. We will run through a few examples for you to better understand the various types:

• Matches: I may want my users to have the same hard skills. In this case, I would select the Matches rule. For example, I might want users to have the same type of coding language skills.
• Does not Match: In this case, I may want my users to have different hard skills. For example, sticking with coding languages, I might want users to have skills in two different languages to match together. 
• Matches in certain cases: For this rule, I might want users with a specific hard skill to only be able to match with users who reported they have a set of specific hard skills. For example, I want mentees with "Marketing Placeholder 1" to match with mentors with only "Sales Placeholder 1" skills:

• Let users indicate their preference in match: in this case, I might want mentors to be asked one question, and mentees to be asked a slightly different question. Typically this would be used to understand what users prefer in a match. For example, my question will ask my mentees "What hard skills do you want a mentor to help you with?", and I would ask my mentors "What hard skills can you mentor someone on?"

For this example, I am going to keep it simple and select a regular Matches rule (i.e. both the mentee and mentor's hard skills should match):

Making changes to your question text:

Here you can edit the text of the question, add an optional description, etc.

First, you will want to determine if you need to make any changes to your question, in my case, the question "What are your hard skills" should work well for both mentees and mentors. If you want to add any clarification or instructions to your question, you can also add an optional description by clicking the blue text. This will create a description textbox for you to populate:

Configuring your response options: 

Depending on the Question Type you selected in Step 1, you will see a few different options here. 

For my Hard Skills field, I have selected to organize my response options by Category, with individual response options included in each category. I have broken down my Hard Skills into categories mimicking the various business units I care about for my program:

• To add response options, enter them in the textbox that states "+ Add new option": 

• To add additional categories, click the Add Category button:

Next, you can configure the number of responses a user can select. If you would like your users to be able to select multiple options, you can set that value here. Otherwise, if you only want them to be able to choose one option, you can set this value to 1.

In my case, I would like to give my users a few different options to select and will set this value to 3 responses:

Additionally, you can give your users the ability to add their own responses to the question by toggling the button located under the "Can add custom options" section: 

Lastly, you can select whether or not a response is required for this question by toggling the button located under the "Response Required" section:  

Selecting your question's visibility:

When creating a new question, you can determine who will be able to see this information on other users' profiles. Here you have two options:

• Visible to everyone: Participants and admins can see this field on their profiles.
• Visible to admins and mentors: Only admins and mentors can see and use this information.
• Visible to admins only: This is typically used for more sensitive information that you would like to collect, but not made available to other users to see on a person's profile. Examples could include: pay grade, address, etc.

For my Hard Skills question, I am going to make this information visible to everyone:

Once you have successfully configured your question, click the Next button to proceed: 

Note: If you have created a Personal Development or have set your Matching Logic to "No question logic" you can click the Finish button to create your question!

3. Setting the Match Strength:

The final step in this process is to decide how much you want to prioritize matching users based on this field. You can always edit a field's match strength later on even after registration launches, however, it is best to decide before matching begins. 

When deciding on your matching strength, you have two main options:

• A must: If this rule is not met, users will be prevented from being able to match
• Priority levels: Depending on the priority of this field, you can choose how to weigh this matching field relative to other matchmaking fields. Options include:
  • High priority
  • Medium priority
  • Low priority
  • Custom priority: With a custom priority, you can enter a specific value (ex: 5). Values above 5 will be treated as a step above "High priority", and values less than 1 will act as a step below "Low priority. 

For my Hard Skills field, I am going to set it as a must in order for users to be matched together.

Once you have decided on your matching strength, be sure to click the blue Finish button in the bottom right-hand corner to finalize your new field!

Once you have completed the setup for your question, you will see it appear alongside your other fields back on the Questions & Algorithm page: 

To continue building your Cohort program, head over to Step 4 - Matching Process

Have more questions? Submit a request here and let us know how we can help!